What We’re Reading

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Last year, SiriusXM launched a podcast subscription that gets you ad-free listening to 99PI plus special bonus episodes. These bonus episodes have featured extended cuts, Q&As, peeks behind the scene of making 99PI, and some more informal chats with the crew here. Those are my favorites. After we finished up The Power Broker, a bunch of people on the Discord were asking us what other books we’ve been reading. So, a group of us got together on Zoom and presented some of our recent favorites. And the choices were so good and surprising and everyone was so charming I felt like sharing this bonus episode with the wider 99PI audience. Enjoy.

Hello to SiriusXM Podcasts+ subscribers. This is Roman Mars here with a fun bonus episode for you. The 99PI team reads a lot. We read for research, we read for story ideas, and of course we read for fun. So, we thought that, this month, it’d be fun to talk about the books that we’re currently reading. And maybe we’ll give you some gift ideas for the beautiful nerds in your life. So, we have a whole mix of producers on the Zoom call with me. And I’m going to start with Lasha Madan. Lasha, what are you reading right now? 

LASHA MADAN: Hello, Roman. So, I–at any given moment–am always reading three to seven books at the same time. Every morning, I like to sit down with my coffee, in my reading chair, and sit down for 15, 20 minutes and pick a book from my stack of books in progress at random. That stack right now has short fiction, poetry, a memoir… It has communist speculative oral history. [CHUCKLES] All sorts of things. But I got decision fatigue and struggled with picking one book from the stack. So, I decided to… Instead of telling you about books in progress, I want to talk to you about a book that’s been sitting on my shelf for the last four years. I’ve actually never read it fully cover to cover. But I keep revisiting it every couple months. And my relationship to this book is actually really connected to my work on this show.

ROMAN MARS: Okay. 

LASHA MADAN: So, one thing I love about being a producer is that there’s so many different phases of a production process, right? There’s the pitching, the researching, interviewing, writing, scoring… The hardest phase for me is that brief window of time when I’ve submitted a first draft to an editor and it’s in their hands. They’re reading it–tearing it up with notes. And in this window of time, I cannot look at my laptop or my phone. You know when someone’s editing your Google Doc and you get all the notifications?

ROMAN MARS: Right, right, right. That’s horrible. 

LASHA MADAN: So, ever since my first story on the show, I started doing something that has sort of… It kind of unintentionally became a ritual in this very particular time frame. I’ll hand in a script, close my laptop, and… I’ll pickle something. 

ROMAN MARS: Literally? 

LASHA MADAN: Literally, I will pickle anything I find in my house. It’s like a distraction mechanism to stop getting anxious about how my editor is reacting to my script. And maybe it’s because my first story was during peak pandemic and everyone was talking about fermentation. But I just needed something to do with my hands. And so, the book that I’m constantly revisiting every time I work on a story for the show is called Usha’s Pickle Digest: The Perfect Pickle Recipe Book. And I want to tell you about this woman, Usha. This woman is known on the internet as the Pickle Queen of India. In 1998, she self-published this pickling encyclopedia. It’s not a modern cookbook. You can tell it was published on Microsoft Word. The foreword to the book was faxed to the publisher and just tacked into the book. There are over a thousand pickle recipes in there, and it reads like a textbook. There’s only text and no images. I don’t know if you’ll be able to see, but I’m just going to hold the cover up for you just so you can see how old school it looks. 

ROMAN MARS: It has real self-published vibes, for sure. Yeah. 

LASHA MADAN: So, this book–it actually has a cult following. But Usha never meant to publish a pickle book, and I find that whole story really charming. She’s a retired lawyer, now in her 70s. And it started for her as a collection of 25 or so pickle recipes that she scribbled into a notebook to pass on to her friends and family. And over time, the number of recipes grew and grew, and a book started to make logical sense. But even then, the purpose of the book to her was to conveniently share all her recipes with friends and family, which is why, when she published this book in 1998, she only printed 1,000 copies and gave them all out for free. And for years, finding a hardcopy of this book was a real challenge because Usha just wasn’t printing them. The only way to get one was to email her herself. But for years, shortly after the book was published, Usha suffered a health condition, and she would respond to the email saying, “I promise to get you a copy soon.” Some cooks and fans couldn’t wait. They started self-photocopying pages and passing them around. And Usha was supposedly like, “Great.” And eventually when she got healthier, she’d email people back with a free PDF of her book whenever they asked. So, it kind of passed around the world in this way as an email attachment. And I love the book because it has the essence of an extremely comprehensive Google Doc passed around by an auntie who just wants you to know how to make things taste good. And I think that’s why I love it. 

ROMAN MARS: It’s amazing. I love this story. Like, I think this should almost be a story for the show. Although, what would you do when the script was being edited? 

LASHA MADAN: I know, right?

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS] I don’t want to cannibalize your safe haven that you go to when you’re not thinking about stories. But this is such a great idea. Usha’s Pickle Digest: The Perfect Pickle Recipe Book. That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. I love this.

LASHA MADAN: Yeah, and I should say that, even though historically this book has been hard to get a hold of because there’s been so few copies going around, it did–four or five years ago–come online. So, you actually can buy this now as a gift for someone you love, and I would highly recommend that. Could I just, like, rattle off a couple different possible pickles you could possibly make?

ROMAN MARS: Oh, please! Absolutely. 

LASHA MADAN: Okay. I recently made a sweet and sour orange peel pickle. Watermelon rind pickle. There’s jackfruit pickle. You could pickle gooseberries or lotus stems or banana flowers. Like, really anything, I think that… Yeah, nothing escapes pickling for Usha. Yeah, I just love that so much.

ROMAN MARS: I love it. I love it. I think this is the perfect gift for anybody just because it’s, like… In and of itself, the book is this amazing story, which is so cool. Well, anyway, that’s awesome. Thank you so much. Everyone has a lot to live up to because that’s almost a story in and of itself. So, thank you, Lasha. I appreciate it.

LASHA MADAN: Yeah, thanks. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, up next is Chris Berube. Chris, what book do you have for the 99PI audience? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, Roman, this year I’ve been reading a book that I think our audience will get a lot out of. It’s called The Power Broker by Robert Caro. 

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS]

CHRIS BERUBE: It’s a really interesting book about urbanism and history. I read it this year for the second time because we were doing it and have had a great time reading it all over again. But may I recommend another huge book I’ve been reading if you need another thousand-page-plus nonfiction piece to fill that void in your heart. It’s called What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer. Have you ever read this book, Roman?

ROMAN MARS: I have not. No. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay. Do you know what it’s about?

ROMAN MARS: No. No. So, yeah, please tell me more.

CHRIS BERUBE: One thing I really took away from this book… When Republicans talk about Ronald Reagan–and they did it during this election too–they always talk about Ronald Reagan as, like, the greatest figure in their party. It’s Lincoln and Reagan–those are the two great Republicans ever. Reading this book from 1988, it is very clear that, at the time, Republicans did not like Ronald Reagan. They really hated Ronald Reagan. So, I have a quote that I wrote down. This is from Bob Dole, who was, at the time, the leader of the Republican conference in the Senate. And this is what he said about the President from his own party. Bob Dole used to tell a joke to the people that he worked with. He said, “Boys, there was good news last night. A bus full of supply-siders–” Supply-side economics people–the people in Reagan’s camp. “A bus full of supply-siders went off a cliff last night and everyone died. There’s bad news. There were three empty seats on the bus.” So, this is within his own party at this point. He has so thoroughly lost his own conference that people are like, “We gotta get past Reagan.” There’s sections in the book about how, campaigning for the Senate in 1986, people were like, “Don’t send Reagan. Don’t send Reagan to campaign for us. We don’t want him here.” So, it’s really interesting to read these contemporary histories to sort of see how they’ve been tweaked and revised over time, even within the Republican Party at that time. Next time you hear, “Ronald Reagan, the great Republican president,” just remember what Bob Dole said about supply-siders going over a cliff in a bus.

So, What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer–a really very readable, compelling book if you need just a gigantic nonfiction thing to fill the place that The Power Broker was holding for you this year. 

ROMAN MARS: I love it. This is kind of perfect. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of this more. I don’t know why I haven’t, but this is amazing. I’m going to pick this one up for sure. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Totally. You know, is it probably because the ’88 election doesn’t really feel important anymore? Bush was a one-term president, right? And we don’t really think about his presidency as an era the way that we do with Reagan or Clinton or Obama or Trump now?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, when I’m looking on Amazon, this book is paired with books like Game Change–things that I’m a little bit more familiar with. It’s also possible that it’s just because it came in the early ’90s. I was in college then. And so, therefore, I have a kind of a cultural black hole during the periods of 1990 to ’94 that, if it was really, really big at that moment, I was not paying attention at that moment. But this looks amazing. I’m super excited to check it out. Thank you, Chris.

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, enjoy. Absolutely, Roman. I hope you have some great, fun reading time ahead over the holidays for you and your family. 

ROMAN MARS: I appreciate that. Thanks. Okay, so, up next is our producer, Vivian Le. Hey, Vivian. 

VIVIAN LE: Roman Mars. How are you doing?

ROMAN MARS: I’m great. So what book are you reading right now?

VIVIAN LE: Okay. So, I am a not very literate person. I do not like to read. When I do, it is usually, like, a really smutty romance book. You just happened to catch me at a time that I actually am reading books I’m not embarrassed to say on the air. And I’m reading actually three books right now, which I will probably never finish because I’m reading three and I have a short attention span and I keep rotating them and I might finish them in, like, three years. So, in the mornings, I have been reading a book called Orbital by Samantha Harvey. It’s a book that takes place over 24 hours, and it’s the life of a group of astronauts on an international space station. And yeah, there’s no plot. It’s kind of like The Martian but without all the stuff. It’s got the science, and it’s got meditations on life. And it’s very poetic. And it’s just about, like, nature and… Yeah, it’s really beautiful, and it’s very meditative. So, it’s something that I’ve been reading in the morning to kind of, like, scene set my day. I am not someone who’s very interested in Mars. That’s kind of a red flag for me. If you say that you want to go to Mars, I’m like, “No. Sorry. Talk to somebody else.” 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or just: “Please go, and don’t talk to me.”

VIVIAN LE: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But there’s something about reading about space in this way that makes you feel very big and very small at the same time. So, it’s a nice way to set my morning. Yeah, before bed, I’ve been reading a book called Martyr by Kaveh Akbar. You’ve probably heard about this one. This one has been a big one this year. 

ROMAN MARS: This is one that’s on my shelf that I want to read because it’s the type of book I like a lot when I’m not reading nonfiction. 

VIVIAN LE: Yes, I read a lot of fiction. I love fiction. But yeah, it’s incredible. It’s a really fun read. It doesn’t sound like it’s a fun read. It is about an angsty Iranian American writer who, you know, is recently sober. And he seeks out this artist who’s terminally ill. And her last artwork is essentially dying in a museum. And it doesn’t sound upbeat, but it’s weirdly upbeat. It’s from the perspective of, you know, multiple characters who are kind of searching for the meaning of life. But yeah, it’s really fun and really funny in odd ways. And it just feels very fresh. So, I really recommend that for people who are looking for a page turner this year.

ROMAN MARS: Awesome. Well, I’ll put that more to the top of my queue because it’s been one that’s been sitting there that I’ve been excited about. That’s awesome. 

VIVIAN LE: Yeah, that one holds up. In light of the election, I have been revisiting Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. This is the last book that I’m kind of listening to right now. I’m listening to the audiobook. And this is an old one from, like, 1985. People have probably heard of it before. It’s about the effects of television and electronic media on politics and how, you know, it’s turning news into entertainment and that’s ruining discourse forever. You can probably imagine why I’m revisiting it at this moment.

ROMAN MARS: I think of this title all the time. Yeah. 

VIVIAN LE: Yeah. So, yeah, I’ve been listening to the audiobook when I cook. And the experience is kind of like if you gave Joe Rosenberg three shots of whiskey and you just asked him what’s wrong with discourse and he just kind of talked at you for, like, three and a half hours. That’s what it’s like. So, if you want that experience, check that out. 

JOE ROSENBERG: I’m right here, Vivian. 

VIVIAN LE: [LAUGHS] Oh, I know. I know. I know. And you know this is true, Joe. 

JOE ROSENBERG: No comment. 

VIVIAN LE: But I do have one bonus recommendation for a smutty romance if people are looking for one. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, yeah! Lay it on us, yeah.

VIVIAN LE: I read this year and really enjoyed How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang. So, yeah, it’s about trauma a little bit–so just a little bit of a warning there. But it feels a little bit heavier. But it’s a really nice read, and it has one of the most accurate representations of what it’s like to fight with your Asian parents and then make up from that fight. So, if you’re an Asian American person, just–you know–go into that with that in mind. 

ROMAN MARS: Great. Well, these are fantastic recommendations. For someone who says they don’t read, you’re sort of reading a lot of, like, good quality things, so… 

VIVIAN LE: This is a complete coincidence. Otherwise, I’d be watching Gilmore Girls again in the other room. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s awesome. Well, I’m going to do a proper sort of summary just so people are taking notes. So, it’s Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Martyr by Kaveh Akbar, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, and How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang.

VIVIAN LE: You got it. Thanks. 

ROMAN MARS: Thank you, Vivian. We have recommendations from Jayson and Joe and me after the break…

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So, up next is producer Jayson De Leon. Hey, Jayson. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Roman Mars, what’s going on? 

ROMAN MARS: I don’t know. I’m just, like, really excited about all these books. I wasn’t expecting that I would learn from this. I thought we were just going to do this for the audience and the, you know, listeners out there. But, like, now I’m really into all these books that people are suggesting. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Well, I’m going to take it down a notch here because, as people on this team know, I had a kid this past year. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. That’s right. 

JAYSON DE LEON: She just turned a year old. And so I’m here to talk about a fantastic book that I’m reading and I read three times in a row, every night, very slowly to her. It’s called Hoppity Frog. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay. 

JAYSON DE LEON: So, this Hoppity Frog… “Where is Hoppity Frog? Is he in the coral? Not here, but this is a tiny tadpole.” So, I do this over and over and over again. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s awesome. I remember those days very, very, very much. When you get into the age of them liking more complex narratives, it is, like, the most refreshing and amazing thing in the world. 

JAYSON DE LEON: I can see it washing over you. 

ROMAN MARS: It is just, like… You know, when you start reading Roald Dahl or, like, Terry Pratchett–The Wee Free Men–and stuff like this… When that happened with the kids, I was just so excited. I was excited about reading time. You’re mostly excited about it. But you read the same thing again and again, it does sort of get into your brain. 

JAYSON DE LEON: It’s like an incantation. Anyway, on a more serious note I’ve been struggling to find time to read in the past year, as you can imagine.

ROMAN MARS: Of course. 

JAYSON DE LEON: And so, despite the fact that I’ve read something like 200 children’s books, I’ve been trying to find a grownup book to read. And basically, to institute time for myself to create this time to read, I do a novel in the morning, where I have, like, 15 minutes. And I just try to get through a novel, little by little. And I do poetry at night because, by 8:30 or 9:00, if I’m in repose, I’m out. I’m going to bed. And so I just finished this book. It’s called Scattered Snows, to the North. It’s the most recent collection of poems by my favorite poet, Carl Phillips. Are you much of a poetry person, Roman?

ROMAN MARS: I’m not. But it’s because of lack of exposure and sort of knowledge. I would love to be a person who loved poetry more. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Yeah. Well, let’s see if I could sell you a little bit at least on this specific poet. Let’s see if I can do it because, for me, I love poems because they just require my full attention. And my attention is so pulled in so many directions right now. And I’m also a former athlete. And I feel like reading poetry is like doing sports while sitting still. You have to almost wrestle this dynamic in your head and read the words very carefully. You have to read letter by letter, word by word, line break by line break–and then you do it all over again. And you can interpret different meanings from it. I don’t know. To me, it feels very sportlike in that way.

ROMAN MARS: That is an amazing metaphor. I’ve never heard that before. And it makes reading poetry, all of a sudden, make sense to me–and in a new kind of way. That’s… Oh, you might’ve already sold me. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Yeah, there we go. It’s like working out. All right. Well, maybe I’m not selling it now.

ROMAN MARS: No, but I get what you mean. I get what you mean. My problem with poetry and for a lot of things–graphic novels and stuff, too–I tend to read for plot and information. And I’m not a real… I love when people put together interesting and cool and beautiful words. But my habit is just like, “Give me the information as fast as possible.” And so the idea of it being an exercise would put me in the right mindset for it, I think. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Yeah. Yeah. That’s really what it is. And, for me, I also read that way, too. I love a good plot. I love all that stuff. But sometimes I find myself just going through like I’m just not reading.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, totally. 

JAYSON DE LEON: And this makes me read. Anyway, so, Carl Phillips’ latest book… I mean, he’s written a lot of poetry works. I’ve read his full collection now by this point. He started publishing in the ’90s. And I don’t know which book number this is, but it’s his latest book. He just won the Pulitzer last year or two years ago for this book called Then the War, which was an incredible book. It is so, so, so very good. And that is another recommendation for people. And that book was about, like, power, I guess? Capital “P” power, lowercase “p” power–all kinds of power. 

ROMAN MARS: A nice addendum to The Power Broker about power.

JAYSON DE LEON: And the thing that I like the most about his work is that it feels like a conversation that he’s having that I’m following along–the way he’s thinking in that moment. And I just kind of keep following along the way he’s thinking. And so, that last collection was about power. This one that I just finished reading is a lot more about, like, questioning knowledge, I guess. It’s a little bit more like, “What is our obsession with the past? Is it a worthy endeavor?” And so, in the title poem to the book… It’s called Scattered Snows, to the North. And he is a scholar of the Roman Empire. And so, in this poem, he’s questioning the utility of that knowledge. So, I’m gonna read just a little bit of it, just so you can get a taste of it. 

“Does it matter that the Roman

Empire was still early in its slow

unwinding into never again? Then,

as now, didn’t people burst into tears

in front of other people, or in private,

for no reason that they were willing

to give, or they weren’t yet able to,”

So, I don’t know. I just kind of… He tries to find the human at the center of the thing, trying to strip it of the power and of all the other stuff that’s around it. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I love that. That’s so good. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Yeah. And then, I guess, one last thing I’ll say about Carl Phillips’ work and just kind of the work of poets that I admire in general is that sometimes I love their stuff so much that I refuse to hear their voice. I get all these things in my feed of being like, “Here’s the poet that… Obviously, you’ve been looking up their work and stuff. Do you want to hear them read a poem?” And I never ever want to hear them read the poem. 

ROMAN MARS: Interesting. Interesting. Interesting.

JAYSON DE LEON: I’m just afraid that, if I hear the human voice to the words, the thing will lose its magic.

ROMAN MARS: Wow. 

JAYSON DE LEON: And so, he’s one of those people for me. One of my best friends lives very close to where he lives, on Cape Cod. And whenever I go visit, I’m always like, “Am I going to run into Carl today? And would that be a good thing or a bad thing? In the grand scheme of things, it would be lovely to meet him. But I don’t think I want to. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s so interesting. Well, that’s a great recommendation. I love this window into your mind and how you think and process things. That’s so cool. So, you mentioned reading a novel in the other part of the day. What’s your novel?

JAYSON DE LEON: Oh, yeah. My novel that I’m reading right now is this book called Blackouts by Justin Torres. And that book is just an amazing piece of work. I don’t want to talk too much about it because I’m only, like, a third of the way through it. But it reminds me of my actual, true favorite book, which is Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. And that is, like, this book that inspired Gabriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude and all that stuff. And so, it’s very short, actually–Pedro Paramo. It’s only, like, 110 pages or something. But it is just perfect. Every sentence is perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect. And they actually just made a Netflix movie about it that I am horrified to watch. But it is Rodrigo Prieto, who is the director of photography for a lot of great things. So, I imagine it looks beautiful. I’m just afraid of what they did to the story. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I mean, especially if so much of the magic for you is the perfect sentences, there’s no way to convey perfect sentences in a Netflix movie. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Unfortunately, yeah. 

ROMAN MARS: But that’s awesome. Well, these are two very interesting– So, it’s Blackouts by Justin Torres and Scattered Snows, to the North: Poems by Carl Phillips. Thank you, Jayson. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Yep, of course. Oh, yeah. And Hoppity Frog. 

ROMAN MARS: And Hoppity Frog, of course. Yeah, sorry. Not to forget– Not to leave Hoppity Frog out of this, but Hoppity Frog sounds delightful. All right. Well, so, our last contributor that’s going to talk about books that he’s reading is Joe Rosenberg. Hey, Joe. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Hey, Roman. How’s it going? 

ROMAN MARS: I’m good. I’m really excited by everyone’s… Like, we were going to all come on and then people were going to drop off and go on with their day of production. And I’ve noticed that everyone is still on the Zoom because they are so entranced by people talking about the books that they like, which is amazing. So, what book are you sort of occupied with right now? 

JOE ROSENBERG: So, I was coming across this article about Eric Adams and, you know, the corruption scandal. And I was always fascinated and have always been fascinated by the way corrupt figures, particularly more corrupt politicians in more corrupt parts of the political system, are so casually corrupt. Do you know what I mean? And it’s just taken for granted that this is the way the world works. And so they work their way in the world, but then they get a little too high profile. And so, the things that worked for them when they were low profile don’t work for them anymore, right? 

ROMAN MARS: Totally. 

JOE ROSENBERG: And they kind of get caught by surprise, being like, “What do you mean I can’t use this Turkish airline?” But this article I found recommended a book from 1905 called Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. And I don’t know if this has come up at all in your own kind of maneuvering through 99PI or The Power Broker stuff. But Tammany Hall, of course, was the great big political machine that ran Democratic politics and Irish American politics and, therefore, a lot of New York City politics around the turn of the last century–so, late nineteenth century, early twentieth century–and even extended kind of its tentacles into the mid-twentieth century before FDR and a few other people kind of finally put the nails in its coffin. And Plunkitt–George Washington Plunkitt–was this big machine politician in Tammany Hall. You know, he had every single thing. So, I’m looking at his Wikipedia page here. “Member of the New York Senate for the 17th District.” “Member of the New York Senate for the 11th District.” “Member of the New York state assembly for the 17th District,” again. And, like, all these other local and state offices… Whether he was good at any of these jobs is totally unclear.

ROMAN MARS: It was not required of Tammany Hall, for sure, that you were good at the job. 

JOE ROSENBERG: No, exactly. He had a sixth grade education. He was born to Irish American parents on a hill in what would become Central Park. You know, he’s buried in that… I forget what it’s called; I only lived in New York for two years, so apologies. But you know that famous cemetery in Queens that you always see in the movies, where you see the tombstones in the foreground and Manhattan in the background. So, you know, New York born and bred and died. And unlike a lot of Tammany men, he was very open about the way things worked. He was a talker. He liked to talk, and he would kind of hold court at this shoeshine stand at the local courthouse and just have these kind of soliloquies prepared about just different aspects of politics and his thoughts and insights and wisdoms on politics. And this reporter named William Riordon finally just decided that he’d put all of this guy’s talks together in a book. And he just called it Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. And it’s just kind of his thoughts about this and that–about, like, why a politician should not drink, why a politician should never… His clothes should never be too fancy–things like that. But also a lot about his defense of the Tammany system and kind of his defense of what we would think of as corruption–but he just saw as, in some ways, like, “What do you mean? This is the way the world works. How else will anything get done?” There’s one chapter called The Curse of Civil Service Reform. He hates civil service reform. And throughout this little book, he just takes every moment to talk about how awful it is and how it’s ruining New York, right? And civil service reform being, of course, that you can’t use the spoils system. In order to become a civil servant, you can’t just be plunked into the office as a sinecure. You have to take a test and stuff like that.

ROMAN MARS: Take a test. Earn it. It’s supposed to be a meritocracy, for sure. Yeah. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Right. And so, you have to imagine Plunkitt sitting at his shoeshine stand and just kind of holding forth on this. “It’s an outrage. What did the people mean when they voted for Tammany? What is representative government anyhow? Is it all fake that this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people? If it isn’t fake, then why isn’t the people’s voice obeyed and Tammany men put in all the offices? When the people elected Tammany, they knew just what they were doing. We didn’t put up any false pretenses. We didn’t go in for humbug civil service and all that rot. We stood as we have always stood, for rewarding the men that won the victory. They call that the spoils system. All right, Tammany is the spoils system. And when we go in, we fire every anti-Tammany man from office that can be fired under the law. It’s an elastic sort of law, and you can bet it will be stretched to the limit.” Right? And you know, he kind of just goes on like that with different things.

ROMAN MARS: Wow. Well, this is really fascinating. I picked this up– It’s a short, little book that I picked up on your recommendation. I have not cracked it open yet. So, now I’m really intrigued to start on it. So, thank you so much, Joe. I appreciate it. 

JAYSON DE LEON: Wait, so, Roman, you’ve gotten all of our recommendations. But what are you reading right now, besides The Power Broker, of course? 

ROMAN MARS: I read a lot for the show, so I don’t have a lot of time. I have to blurb books for folks. And it’s a very nice thing that people care about my opinion and want to put it on the cover of a book to be sold. So, I read a lot of those. But the one I’ve been reading kind of for myself recently is John McPhee’s Pine Barrens. John McPhee–if you don’t know him–he’s sort of this master of creative nonfiction. I mostly read nonfiction. There’s some kind of block in my head that makes it so I can’t read a lot of stories about made-up people because, in the end, I just feel the authorship too much. And I just like to learn about history and use the time to learn about history. But The Pine Barrens is a very… It is from 1968. It’s a very sort of essayistic, somewhat poetic, full of facts tale about this area of New Jersey, which is extremely, you know, confusing. Like, it’s this very kind of harsh and barren land in the most densely populated state in the Union. And, you know, it has a poetry to the place–and then, therefore, it allows for a certain kind of poetry in the writing of it. And it’s extremely nonlinear. I just think that he’s kind of a master of a certain type of creative nonfiction, which I don’t read a lot of. And so I’ve been trying to dig into John McPhee and sort of get myself a little more versed in his library, which I think has been… It’s not really a blind spot for me because I’ve read plenty. But he’s written so much that I have not read that I’ve been trying to attack it. So, I would recommend picking up The Pine Barrens by John McPhee. It’s really working for me.

And that’s it for all of us. So, thank you, everyone, for listening to this. And I hope you got a lot of good book recommendations. I mean, I’m super into the books that people suggested. And so thanks. I really appreciate it.

Become a SiriusXM Podcasts+ subscriber to get ad-free listening and more bonus episodes. We really enjoyed doing this one, and we’re looking forward to more in 2025. Get in touch if you have any suggestions or things you wanna hear from us. 

This episode was mixed by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. 

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. 

 You can find us on Bluesky, as well as our own Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.